The Year’s Best Science Fiction (St Martin's) 26

by Gardner Dozois

It quickly became obvious that he couldn’t just fly in there. The jet could have gotten him to it in two hours at top speed, but he’d have burned to death long before arriving. He idled, advancing just enough to discourage anyone from following.

  He looked back after twenty minutes of this, and swore. There were no clouds or constructions of any kind between him and the anthropause, so the little dot that was following him was clearly visible. He’d made at least one enemy, it was clear; who knew how many of them were hanging off that lone jet?

  He opened the throttle a little, hunkering down behind the jet’s inadequate windscreen to cut the blazing light and heat as much as he could. After a few minutes he noticed that it was lessening of itself: Candesce was going out.

  The light reddened as the minutes stretched. The giant fusion engines of the sun of suns were winking out one by one; Candesce was not one sun, but a flock of them. Each one was mighty enough to light a whole nation, and together they shaped the climate and airflow patterns of the entire world. Their light was scattered and absorbed over the leagues, of course, until it was no longer visible. But Candesce’s influence extended to the very skin of the world where icebergs cracked off Virga’s frost-painted wall. Something, invisible and not to be tasted or felt, blazed out of here as well with the light and the heat: the field, which scrambled the energies and thoughts of any device more complicated than a clock. Jessie’s jet was almost as complex as a machine could get in Virga. Since the world’s enemies depended entirely on their technologies, they could not enter here.

  This was protection; but there had been a cost. Jessie understood that part of his rightful legacy was knowledge, but he’d never been given it. The people in Virga knew little about how the world worked, and nothing about how Candesce lived. They were utterly dependent on a device their ancestors had built but that most of them now regarded as a force of nature.

  Light left the sky, but not the heat. That would take hours to dissipate, and Jessie didn’t have time to wait. He sucked some water from the wine flask hanging off his saddle, and approached the inner circle of Candesce. Though the last of its lamps were fading red embers, he could still see well enough by the light of the principalities. Their millionfold glitter swam and wavered in the heat haze, casting a shimmering light over the crystalline perfection of the sun of suns. He felt their furnace-heat on his face, but he had dared a capital bug’s howl; he could dare this.

  The question was, where in a cloud of dozens of suns would a precipice moth nest? The dying moth had told Jessie that it was here, and it made perfect sense: Where was the one place from which the key could not be stolen? Clearly in the one place that you’d need that key to enter.

  This answer seemed simple until you saw Candesce. Jessie faced a sky full of vast crystal splinters, miles long, that floated freely in a formation around the suns themselves. Those were smaller, wizened metal-and-crystal balls, like chandeliers that had shrunk in on themselves. And surrounding them, unfolding from mirrored canopies like flowers at dawn, other vast engines stirred.

  He flew a circuit through the miles-long airspace of the sun of suns; then he made another. He was looking for something familiar, a town wheel for giants or some sort of block house that might survive the heat here. He saw nothing but machinery, and the night drew on towards a dawn he could not afford to be here to see.

  The precipice moth he’d spoken to had been partly alive—at least, it had looked like that leathery skin covered muscles as well as body internal machinery. But what living thing could survive here? Even if those mirrored metal flowers shielded their cores from the worst of the radiation, they couldn’t keep out the heat. He could see plainly how their interiors smoked as they spilled into sight.

  Even the tips of those great diamond splinters were just cooling below the melting point of lead. Nothing biological could exist here.

  Then, if the moth was here, it might as well be in the heart of the inferno as on the edge. With no more logic to guide him than that, Jessie aimed his jet for the very center of Candesce.

  Six suns crowded together here. Each was like a glass diatom two hundred feet in diameter, with long spines that jutted every which way in imitation of the gigantic ones framing the entire realm. Thorns from all the suns had pinioned a seventh body between them—a black oval, whose skin looked like old cast iron. Its pebbled surface was patterned with raised squares of brighter metal, and inset squares of crystal. Jessie half-expected to faint from the heat as he approached it, and he would die here if that happened; but instead, it grew noticeably cooler as he closed the last few yards.

  He hesitated, then reached out to touch the dark surface. He snatched his hand back: it was cold.

  This must be the generator that made Candesce’s protective field. It was this thing that kept the world’s enemies at bay.

  Gunning the jet, he made a circuit of the oval. It looked the same from all angles and there was no obvious door. But, when he was almost back to his starting point, Jessie saw distant city-light gleam off something behind one of the crystal panels. He flew closer to see.

  The chrome skeleton of a precipice moth huddled on the other side of the window. It was too dark for Jessie to make out what sort of space it was sitting in, but from the way its knees were up by its steel ears, it must not be large.

  There wasn’t a scrap of flesh on this moth, yet when Jessie reached impulsively to rap on the crystal, it moved.

  Its head turned and it lowered a jagged hand from its face. He couldn’t see eyes, but it must be looking at him.

  “Let me in!” Jessie shouted. “I have to talk to you!”

  The moth leaned its head against the window and its mouth opened. Jessie felt a kind of pulse—a deep vibration. He put his ear to the cold crystal and the moth spoke again.

  “WAIT.”

  “You’re the one, aren’t you? The moth with the key?”

  “WAIT.”

  “But I have to . . .” He couldn’t hear properly over the whine of the jet, so Jessie shut it down. The sound died—then, a second later, died again. An echo? No, that other note had been pitched very differently.

  He cursed and spun around, losing his grip on the inset edge of the window. As he flailed and tried to right himself, a second jet appeared around the curve of the giant machine. There was one rider in its saddle. The dark silhouette held a rifle.

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I want what you want,” said a familiar voice. “Nothing less than the greatest treasure in the world.”

  “Chirk, what are you doing here? How did—did you follow me?”

  She hove closer and now her canary-yellow jacket was visible in the glow of distant cities. “I had to,” she said. “The wreck was empty, Jess! All that hard work and risking our lives, and there was nothing there. Emmen took it under tow—had to make the best of the situation, I guess—but for our team, there was nothing. All of us were so mad, murderous mad. Not safe for me.

  “Then I remembered you. I went looking for you and what should I find? You, juggling for a monster!”

  “I think he liked it,” said Jessie. He hoped he could trust Chirk, but then, why did she have that rifle in her hands?

  “You said you were going to give it a message. When you left I trailed after you. I was trying to think what to do. Talk to you? Ask to join you? Maybe there was a prize for relaying the message. But then you set a course straight for the sun of suns, and I realized what had happened.

  “Give me the key, Jessie.” She leveled the rifle at him.

  He gaped at her, outraged and appalled. “I haven’t got it,” he said.

  She hissed angrily. “Don’t lie to me! Why else would you be here?”

  “Because he’s got it,” said Jessie. He jabbed a thumb at the window. He saw Chirk’s eyes widen as she saw what was behind it. She swore.

  “If you thought I had it, why didn’t you try to take it from me earlier?”

  She looked aside. “Well, I did
n’t know exactly where you were going. If it gave you the key, then it told you where the door was, right? I had to find out.”

  “But why didn’t you just ask to come along?”

  She bit her lip. “ ’Cause you wouldn’t have had me. Why should you? You’d have known I was only in it for the key. Even if I was . . . nice to you.”

  Though it was dark, in the half-visible flight of emotions across her face Jessie could see a person he hadn’t known was there. Chirk had hid her insecurities as thoroughly as he’d hoped to hide his bloody cough.

  “You could have come to me,” he said. “You should have.”

  “And you could have told me you were planning to die alone,” she said. “But you didn’t.”

  He couldn’t answer that. Chirk waved the rifle at the door. “Get it to open up, then. Let’s get the key and get out of here.”

  “If I can get the key from it, ordering it to kill you will be easy,” he told her. A little of the wild mood that had made him willing to dive into a capital bug had returned. He was feeling obstinate enough to dare her to kill him.

  Chirk sighed, and to his surprise said, “You’re right.” She threw away the rifle. They both watched it tumble away into the dark.

  “I’m not a good person, and I went about this all wrong,” she said. “But I really did like you, Jessie.” She looked around uneasily. “I just . . . I can’t let it go. I won’t take it from you, but I need to be a part of this, Jess. I need a share, just a little share. I’m not going anywhere. If you want to sic your monster on me, I guess you’ll just have to kill me.” She crossed her arms, lowered her head, and made to stare him down.

  He just had to laugh. “You make a terrible villain, Chirk.” As she sputtered indignantly, he turned to the window again. The moth had been impassively watching his conversation with Chirk. “Open up!” he shouted at it again, and levering himself close with what little purchase he could make on the window’s edge, he put his ear to the crystal again.

  “WAIT.”

  Jessie let go and drifted back, frowning. Wait? For what?

  “What did it say?”

  “The other moth told me this one wouldn’t let me in unless I proved I was committed. I had to prove I wouldn’t try to take the key.”

  “But how are you going to do that?”

  “Oh.”

  Wait.

  Candesce’s night cycle was nearly over. The metal flowers were starting to close, the bright little flying things they’d released hurrying back to the safety of their tungsten petals. All around them, the rumbling furnaces in the suns would be readying themselves. They would brighten soon, and light would wash away everything material here that was not a part of the sun of suns. Everything, perhaps, except the moth, who might be as ancient as Candesce itself.

  “The other moth told me I wouldn’t deliver the message,” said Jessie. “It said I would decide not to.”

  She frowned. “Why would it say that?”

  “Because . . .’cause it cured me, that’s why. And because the only way to deliver the message is to wait until dawn. That’s when this moth here will open the door for us.”

  “But then—we’d never get out in time . . .”

  He nodded.

  “Tell it—yell through the door, like it’s doing to you! Jessie, we can’t stay here, that’s just insane! You said the other moth cured you? Then you can escape, you can live—like me. Maybe not with me, and you’re right not to trust me, but we can take the first steps together . . .” But he was shaking his head.

  “I don’t think it can hear me,” he said. “I can barely hear it, and its voice is loud enough to topple buildings. I have to wait, or not deliver the message.”

  “Go to the home guard, then. Tell them, and they’ll send someone here. They’ll—”

  “—not believe a word I say. I’ve nothing to show them, after all. Nothing to prove my story.”

  “But your life! You have your whole life . . .”

  He’d tried to picture it on the flight here. He had imagined himself as a baker, a soldier, a diplomat, a painter. He longed for every one of them, for any of them. All he had to do was start his jet and follow Chirk, and one of them would come to pass.

  He started to reach for his jet, but there was nowhere he could escape the responsibility he’d willingly taken on himself. He realized he didn’t want to.

  “Only I can do this,” he told her. “Anyway, this is the only thing I ever had that was mine. If I give it up now, I’ll have some life . . . but not my life.”

  She said nothing, just shook her head. He looked past her at the vast canopy of glittering lights—from the windows in city apartments and town wheel-houses, from the mansions of the rich and the gas-fires of industry: a sphere of people, every single one of them threatened by something that even now might be uncoiling in the cold vacuum outside the world; each and every one of them waiting, though they knew it not, for a helping hand.

  Ten words, or a single coin.

  “Get out of here, Chirk,” he said. “It’s starting. If you leave right now you might just get away before the full heat hits.”

  “But—” She stared at him in bewilderment. “You come too!”

  “No. Just go. See?” He pointed at a faint ember-glow that had started in the darkness below their feet. “They’re waking up. This place will be a furnace soon. There’s no treasure here for you, Chirk. It’s all out there.”

  “Jessie, I can’t—” Flame-colored light blossomed below them, and then from one side. “Jessie?” Her eyes were wide with panic.

  “Get out! Chirk, it’s too late unless you go now! Go! Go!”

  The panic took her and she kicked her jet into life. She made a clumsy pass, trying to grab Jessie on the way by, but he evaded her easily.

  “Go!” She put her head down, opened the throttle, and shot away. Too late, Jessie feared. Let her not be just one second too late.

  Her jet disappeared in the rising light. Jessie kicked his own jet away, returning to cling to the edge of the window. His own sharp-edged shadow appeared against the metal skull inches from his own.

  “You have your proof!” He could feel the pulse of energy—heat, and something deeper and more fatal—reaching into him from the awakening suns. “Now open up.

  “Open up!”

  The moth reached out and did something below the window. The crystalline pane slid aside, and Jessie climbed into the narrow, boxlike space. The window slid shut, but did nothing to filter the growing light and heat from outside. There was nowhere further to go, either. He had expected no less.

  The precipice moth lowered its head to his.

  “I have come to you on behalf of humanity,” said Jessie, “to tell you that the ancient strategy of relying on Candesce for our safety will no longer work . . .”

  He told the moth his story, and as he spoke the dawn came up.

  Evil Robot Monkey

  MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL

  Caught between two worlds can be a very uncomfortable place to be.

  New writer Mary Robinette Kowal won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008. Her work has appeared in Cosmos, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Solaris Book of Science Fiction 2, Strange Horizons, Subterranean, Clarkesworld, Twenty Epics, Apex Digest, Apex Online, and Talebones, among other markets. She’s the secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the art director of the magazine Shimmer, and in civilian life is a professional puppeteer and voice actor. She lives in New York City. Her Web site is at maryrobinettekowal.com.

  Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

  Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He sp
un and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

  In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. Swinging down from his stool, he crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.

  The student’s teacher flushed as red as a female in heat and called the children away from the window. She looked back once as she led them out of the courtyard, so Sly grabbed himself and showed her what he would do if she came into his pen.

  Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now, before a handler came to talk to him.

  Damn.

  He just wanted to make pottery. He loped back to the wheel and sat down again with his back to the window. Kicking the wheel into movement, Sly dropped a new ball of clay in the center and tried to lose himself.

  In the corner of his vision, the door to his room snicked open. Sly let the wheel spin to a halt, crumpling the latest vase.

  Vern poked his head through. He signed, “You okay?”

  Sly shook his head emphatically and pointed at the window.

  “Sorry.” Vern’s hands danced. “We should have warned you that they were coming.”

  “You should have told them that I was not an animal.”

  Vern looked down in submission. “I did. They’re kids.”

  “And I’m a chimp. I know.” Sly buried his fingers in the clay to silence his thoughts.

  “It was Delilah. She thought you wouldn’t mind because the other chimps didn’t.”

  Sly scowled and yanked his hands free. “I’m not like the other chimps.” He pointed to the implant in his head. “Maybe Delilah should have one of these. Seems like she needs help thinking.”